Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Jaws of Tamriel - PDQ Hack for Skyrim (Part 1)

I have the opportunity to play a game with my wife and niece in the next couple of days. We live a good two hours from our niece, so the visit for a couple of days is something we're both looking forward to. We've played Fiasco, and she's had some exposure to other rules without a lot of successful actual sessions under her belt, but the wife and I are ready to change that and allow her to be a true bad-ass. There's nothing like you're first real adventure, and so I want to make it awesome.

I also have been itching to try out the Jaws of the Six Serpents PDQ rule set from Silver Branch Games. The rules are very, very lite sword & sorcery, and while the setting does sound pretty awesome, I'd like to shift it to something I understand and know a bit better - Skyrim. Skyrim's my first elder scrolls game, and I've played hours and hours of the thing (which really has no end in sight). It has the added bonus of being almost completely unknown to my wife and niece.

With that in mind, I'm putting together a very simple hack of PDQ for Skyrim, which I have titled Jaws of Tamriel. What I love about PDQ is its simplicity and ability to sculpt into what you need. That being said, I haven't had to put much effort into changing much of the rules. You will need the Jaws of the Six Serpents or at least the Nugget rules (found for free on rpgnow.com) to use these for your own game. Between Jaws of the Six Serpents, the elder scrolls wiki, and the huge, impressive hardcover video game guide, I've got pretty much all I need for not just an epic adventure, but hopefully a huge campaign as well.

Below you can find the first part that I've worked on - replaced the peoples presented in Jaws of the Six Serpents for the ten player races open for players of Skyrim. I plan on posting most in the next week, specifically my magic rules, unique item rules, and potion rules. That's pretty much it for the hack. Enemies are just as easy to make up for Skyrim as they would for any other PDQ game, so I just need to look for the source material for inspiration.

Peoples
of Skyrim

Altmer
– High Elves

Strengths: Hidden Knowledge,
Civilized, Cultured, Wizard

Weaknesses: Snobby,
Feather-Weight

Other: Open Quality ranks can be
spent on Spellcasting*, especially (Illusion). Most common urges are
Fire and Wind.